Andy Kaufman, Joaquin Phoenix, and the Two Lettermans

About two weeks ago I went on a YouTube wander, checking out Andy Kaufman clips. He has been one of my heroes ever since I saw him doing his Mighty Mouse lip-synching bit on The Merv Griffin Show. I was nine years old. I fell off the couch.

I followed him through his Saturday Night Live and Fridays appearances; watched him do his Latka Gravas character (formerly Foreign Man) on the hit sitcom Taxi; was enthralled and weirded out by his pointless-seeming foray into wrestling women, which, in retrospect, helped to make his legacy even while undoing his career. In the years since his death, I’ve read the canonical texts (Bob Zmuda’s Andy Kaufman Revealed; Bill Zehme’s The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman; Julie Hecht’s slim but revealing Was This Man a Genius? Talks With Andy Kaufman); have amassed the videotapes (I’m From Hollywood) and DVDs (The Real Andy Kaufman); and watched, in horrified disappointment, the Milos Forman–Jim Carrey movie, Man on the Moon, which missed its mark just as much as did the sickly sweet R.E.M. tribute song that gave the film its title; and I have, in morbid moments, visited the Smoking Gun web site to gaze at Kaufman’s death certificate looking for a clue, a catch, a tell, in my hope against hope that his 1984 death-by-lung-cancer was his ultimate Houdini act (and that I will be the reporter to break the story … ).

Anyway, while checking out the YouTube clips the other week, I happened on one I had never seen before: Kaufman on David Letterman’s first program, The David Letterman Show, which aired on NBC weekday mornings from June 1980 through October of that year. In this beautiful segment, a down-and-out-seeming Andy Kaufman ends up begging audience members for money. It popped back into my mind the other night, when I saw Joaquin Phoenix doing his thing on Late Show With David Letterman. Phoenix used a lot of the same moves employed by Kaufman on Letterman’s show 29 years ago.At that point, in June of 1980, Kaufman had left Taxi. His new career, centered on making himself the ultimate villain as an anti-feminist wrestler of women, was more interesting to him. Even though this may have been, in some way, a gag or a hoax, he was still losing money and his standing in the industry day by day because of it. Kaufman had the courage of his own comedy. On Letterman’s show, he exaggerated his financial and emotional troubles. He was dressed terribly and wore a scraggly beard. He looked like some 1980 version of the Underground Man. Away from the host’s desk, he sat on a wooden stool and did a monologue in which he mentioned losing his kids (nonexistent) to his ex-wife (fictional) as part of a divorce (never happened). As he spoke, with ultra sincerity, he asked the people in the audience to stop laughing—and it worked! He ended his sob story, remarkably, by asking them for money. He went into the audience with his hands out. It’s a wonderful Kaufman moment. Sometimes, with his stuff, you admire the idea of it more than actually enjoy it. This is true, for instance, of his My Breakfast With Blassie, a mundane-on-purpose short film that Kaufman made to spoof the lofty art-house hit My Dinner With Andre. But the begging-the-audience routine actually got a laugh even as it stayed true to its concept. The big reversal—the celebrity asking the audience for money—is so incredibly great. You can feel the uncertainty in the crowd. At the same time, the bit is broad enough to let you off the hook, to let you in on the joke, to let you laugh.

If you look at the two appearances side by side, you see Phoenix attempting the same pathetic and polite mode of discourse used by Kaufman in his interactions with Letterman. But there’s a big difference between the two segments: With Kaufman, Letterman himself was in on the bit. The two of them were comedy colleagues, partners in absurdity. Dave was more than happy to play along, to help Kaufman move steadily toward his goal in the scene. Even when a blotch of shining snot was shining above Kaufman’s upper lip, Letterman didn’t get all O.C.D. about it. He just grabbed a tissue and mentioned that some people at home might be eating breakfast. With Phoenix, Letterman was equally funny, but he seemed genuinely pissed off, probably because he was, seemingly, not in on the gag.

To Phoenix, Letterman must seem to be not the co-conspirator he was for Kaufman; instead, he is one of Them, an arbiter of taste, a cranky media figure whom celebrities must somehow navigate. That big old raunchy Rick Rubin–style beard on the actor’s face? Phoenix seemed to sense it would set Letterman off, and it did. So did the gum-chewing and polite but slackerish demeanor. When Dave mentioned the gum, he seemed not as amused as he had been with the more egregious snot on Kaufman’s face in 1980.

Phoenix made a mistake, though, as Onion A.V. Club blogger Amelie Gillette has pointed out: he took off his sunglasses at the end of the segment and shook Dave’s hand and seemed to whisper something to him right before the break to commercial—which suggested he wasn’t quite willing to go all the way and may be lacking in comedy courage.

The actor more or less gave away the gag the moment he started doing it in earnest. Talking last month to a reporter from E’s Access Hollywood, with his friend and brother-in-law Casey Affleck standing close by, Phoenix announced his retirement from movies. If he had stopped right there, it would have seemed believable enough. But like a thief who stays too long in the bank vault, stuffing the cash wads into his pockets, Phoenix couldn’t resist pushing his luck, saying into the microphone, with the hint of a smirk, “It seems like it’s Casey’s time now.”

The next time he publicly brought up the notion of retiring, he was on camera with a reporter from the A.P., and he went further into the persona: now the character was not just a full-of-himself Hollywood guy who would say something as conceited as “It seems like it’s Casey’s time now,” but a near-lunatic who masks his shallowness in comically grandiose language. Asked why he would give up acting, when he was so good at it, Phoenix said, “Kind of what’s an unfair about this business is it’s difficult for me to connote my artism is fucking bigger than that…. Dude, I appreciate your being here for this momentous moment.”

Now, just because we know it’s a joke doesn’t mean it can’t be funny. The question for Phoenix and his collaborator, Affleck, who has been filming the ongoing bit for what would seem to be a mockumentary, is this: Will their gag have an audience beyond their fellow celebrities?

With Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters, the audiences senses something big is at stake: Cohen has made use of Ali G, Borat, and Bruno to reveal something ugly about America—that the people in authority are idiotic and its white masses would not say no to a bit of fascism, if the opportunity were to present itself nicely. With Phoenix and Affleck, there seems to be no goal, at the moment, beyond some Jackass-style fooling around, celebrity-media division. The put on seems rooted in a cannabis reverie that makes you laugh really hard on the couch, especially if you’re an Academy Award nominee: Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if I changed my public persona? And started going around acting all different? Grew a Moses beard? And made a hip-hop album? What would happen then? What would they do?

As Entertainment Weekly’s Web site reported last month, citing people close to Phoenix who spoke anonymously, what he’s doing is indeed a piece of theater. “It’s an art project for him,” the source told EW.com. “He’s going full out. He probably has told his reps that he’s quit acting. Joaquin is very smart. This is very conscious. He has a huge degree of control.” And I think this could be fun, as long as it doesn’t devolve into a George Clooney-style media critique, the one that says, “Leave us celebrities alone, until we give you the signal.”

Last month, Phoenix climbed onto a stage in Vegas like someone buzzed on too much karaoke. He “rapped” and pogoed and fell off the stage. Even as it echoed Johnny Cash’s falling off a Vegas stage in Phoenix’s breakthrough movie, Walk the Line, the actor’s wacko performance seemed to acknowledge there’s nothing so pathetic as the famous actor who wishes to be taken seriously as a musician.

Why this is, I don’t know. Bruce Willis did it, in the guise of “Bruno,” a harmonica-playin’ bad-ass of the late 80s, and he somehow had a hit single with his cover of the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself.” Eddie Murphy scored with “Party All the Time,” and it wasn’t so bad, really. We’ve had William Shatner, Don Johnson, David Hasselhoff, David Soul, Lindsay Lohan, and on and on, and Kevin Bacon keeps riding his Bacon Brothers horse. To join that crew, for Phoenix, it’s a funny idea, a nice basis for a bit. And yet, the weird thing is, despite the awfulness of what he did in Vegas, I wouldn’t put it past him, to come up with something halfway decent. Which might make the joke even better. The more the line is erased, between what is a gag, and what is really happening, the better it will be. He will have total success as a practitioner of guerilla theater if even he doesn’t know when he’s kidding anymore.

I think Phoenix and Affleck may be onto something. Even all these decades after the collapse of the old Hollywood system, in which studio bosses stage-managed the general perception of their stars, the personae of celebrity actors is still a commodity handled with extreme care. To mess with that from the inside, as Phoenix and Affleck are doing now, is pretty interesting, I think. Internet commenters should give them a little slack and see what they come up with before tapping out the usual “STFU” and “Epic Fail.”

To round out our collection of Joaquin clips, here he is rapping and falling off the stage.